Greeley woman believes she’s living...A Purrfect Life

DAN ENGLAND/dengland@greeleytribune.com
Cinder Blue, the pride and joy of the Rocky Mountain Siamese Rescue in Greeley, is 17, maybe 18 and Deb Shrieves' favorite. Shrieves has "about a million" nicknames for her. Shrieves runs the rescue organization with her husband, Geoff and calls it a full-time job even though she is not paid.

DAN ENGLAND/dengland@greeleytribune.com
Deb Shrieves cuddles with Cinder Blue. The couple has a pug and three other cats along with some fosters they ready for adoption. Cats were an important companion to her as a child, which is why she devotes so much time to them now.

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Deb Shrieves’ mother was as bubbly as a shaken can of Sprite around people.

Deb was different. Deb had a cat. It was all she needed.

Granted, she didn’t have much of a choice. She grew up in Maryland, in an older community, where children were scarce. It didn’t seem to matter. A book, and a cat, were much better than Kick the Can.

“They rescued me as a child,” said Deb of her cats. “They filled my soul.”

Years later, that’s why she quit her well-paying job as a project analyst for Ball Aerospace and Technology in Boulder to work for the Humane Society in Longmont. The shelter job did not pay quite as well. OK, not nearly as well. But she remembered her childhood. That’s why she began looking around Denver for shelters to volunteer for in the first place, before she quit Ball Aerospace, and that’s how she wound up with Cinder Blue, the cat with 100 (approximately) nicknames.

Cinnie Minnie, er, Cinder Blue is now 17 and is sweet when she’s not asking for food 40 times a day (seriously), which is fine but the food has to be soft and piled just so in a small salsa bowl. The food thing is a little understandable when you consider Cinder Blue’s past: When Deb first saw her at the shelter, she was thinner than a “Les Miserables” extra, a Siamese with bones and fur. Deb and Geoff couldn’t turn that away.

Today Deb, 44, and Geoff, 49, have their own rescue organization, Rocky Mountain Siamese Rescue, that they run out of their Greeley home. Though Deb has a group of foster homes and her husband, that organization is almost all her. It takes a 40-hour work week, probably more, really, and she does it all out of love, not money (in fact, she gets no money at all).

The cats she had as a child were Siamese, and as an adult, Deb was skeptical at first that those cats would need to be rescued at all. They were exotic and cost a good chunk of money. But as the pet population exploded into the crisis it is now, Siamese cats became less valuable, like most cats, and they are difficult to keep in shelters, Deb said. They can be aggressive, and they usually form such tight bonds with their families that they wallow for months in depression once their owners surrender them. Deb and Geoff started fostering and volunteering for the national Siamese rescue organization and in 1998 formed their own chapter.

The two met in 1996 in an online computer forum. Deb had a problem. Geoff had a good solution. Then they talked beyond the computer. Deb found out Geoff had a cat. That, as you can guess, was a plus. The rest fell into place.

Their family now consists of four cats, a pug, a few foster cats (and it really is a few, as they obey laws intended to prevent hoarding) and a 10-year-old child, Jacob. Deb’s place in her heart for tiny, even helpless creatures was good for Jacob. He was born three months early, just over a pound. A wedding ring looked like a bracelet on his arm. But he lived, and though Deb home schools him now to help with his minor developmental delays, he’s a big, healthy kid who likes video games and cats.

When Jacob was 7, he wanted a cat of his own. He picked out Midnight, a black cat who takes a half-second to warm up to you and has no inkling of the hard beginnings of his mates.

The pregnancy appeared to give her more than Jacob. Deb is allergic to cats. She used filters, a nasal spray, eye drops and shots for years, until she quit all of it because she was pregnant. Now she only needs an over-the-counter allergy medication.

A lot of the job is paperwork, stuff that keeps the organization running smoothly but isn’t a ton of fun. But they still foster cats, and that’s the reward, she said.

“You can get a cat that’s shut down, and you work and work and get it back to being happy or in a good state,” Deb said. “That’s why we do it.”

Cats kept her happy when she was a little girl. They saved her. Now, years later, she still believe it’s up to her to return the favor.

— Staff writer Dan England covers the outdoors, entertainment and general assignment stories for The Tribune. His column runs on Tuesday. If you have an idea for a column, call (970) 392-4418 or e-mail dengland@greeleytribune.com. Follow him on Twitter @ DanEngland.